“If our gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well”
Villiers de L'Isle Adam, L'Eve future
There are so many movies, books that deal with the quintessential philosophical questions, that of the relationship between the body and the mind/soul.
Some do it greatly (ghost in the shell, blade runner/do androids dream of electric sheep, the first matrix, never let me go, brave new world etc) some others not so well (I, Robot). It's not that they fail tragically, but they just don't have the subtlety and the depth of the ones I just mentioned.
The idea that life, soul can spark from an empty shell, that consciousness in people stems from material cell connections in our brain is old. I guess what makes it timeless in a sense that it will always create interest and debates is at the source of our existential questions as human beings: what am I? Where do my feelings come from? Does it necessarily mean that if my feelings are not real, then I can suppress them better? Do I have a role in life?
Even more interestingly, this questions are, I think, ultimately unanswerable. The 'evidence' provided, feelings, is part of the debate itself and in the end the only thing one can rely on, in order to make a decision about all this, is one's intuitions.
Intuitions that are a kind of feelings in any case.
1 comment:
This post is deeeeeep.
I completely and utterly agree.
I like people who have faith because they truly believe that their soul will remain even if their body dies. I'd prefer to believe in an independent soul instead of knowing that my spiritual world and who I am and my feelings depend on a bunch of brain cells just working and working and working to make me feel sad and worried and any other feelings I may have. Deep down, we're all the same. So, our feelings are actually quite irrelevant, if we think about it.
... Now I don't feel so good.
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